Post-It Office Window War - An NYC Story

An unexpected Post-It war has broken out in my office. And I'm the one who started it.

If you work in an office in New York City, chances are your window looks directly into someone else's office. In my particular case, I look into an office AND a hotel. Occasionally, I see a maid making the bed. From what I hear, the 8th and 11th floors of my office have seen less family-friendly displays in the middle of conference calls. Yipes. I'm on floor 2, where, apparently, it's all Disney.

It all started on August 29, 2011, just 3 days after the infamous New York non-hurricane. (Yes, I know it was a real hurricane in other places, but Irene never manifested in NYC, despite our best efforts to scare ourselves.) Rather than explain, here's what I posted to Facebook that day:

Upon seeing this, a friend (Hi Mel!) recommended I check out PostItWar.com. It was love at first sight.

We had a lengthy debate in my office, which is comprised of myself and two other fabulous women in social media management, and decided to break the ice with a simple "Hi!" in the window.

It was a simple test to see if the office across the street was willing to play with us. We have no idea what they do there, or why their office is so enormous and cool, but our only ambition here was and is to make contact. The sheer thrill of communicating via post-its, sadly, is totally enough for us.

Luckily, for our egos and for this blog, our effort paid off:

... we got a "Hi" back. GAME ON, FOLKS.

We didn't know quite where to go from here, so we stalled by posting the next most obvious phrase. It required venturing outside our office and adopting one of the windows in the hall:

 At this point, stuff exploded. Other floors started responding.

Then, we learned later, other floors in our own office got involved. The 9th floor across from "Hola" started to play, as did the floor directly above ours with a candid "Yo!"

(Photo courtesy of Jessica Randazza.)
(The office windows we are utilizing are blocked by scaffolding and not visible from the street.)

As you might imagine, we had no interest in telling anyone to stop. Instead, we kept the momentum of post-it enthusiasm going!

Note the "Woof" upstairs and the "Hi" on a mid-level floor. We meow'd and got the same response downstairs:

Is this blue "Woof" from the same company as the office that "Woof'd" above? We still have no idea.

Naturally, we weren't going to let this just die. We're a marketing agency. And I work there.

So, we gamified it:

There is no ending to this story; it's still going on. Further updates as events warrant.

Can you guess what our Post-It Hangman secret says?